Disney announced Friday that it has reinstated disgraced A-list Hollywood writer-director James Gunn to direct the third installment of the wildly popular Marvel superhero franchise film Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3. Disney fired Gunn over social media posts he made about committing child rape and jokes about the Holocaust, Mexicans, and AIDS.

Redemption and second chances have long been superhero movie staples, and today it looks like life has imitated art. I’ve learned that Disney has reinstated James Gunnas the writer-director of Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and I’ve confirmed it with Marvel and Gunn’s camp.

Why the change of heart? After the firing, Walt Disney Studios president Alan Hornmet with Gunn on multiple occasions to discuss the situation. Persuaded by Gunn’s public apology and his handling of the situation after, Horn decided to reverse course and reinstate Gunn.

Long before he routinely attacked President Trump — in June 2018 Gunn said President Trump “wakes up every morning hoping more kids are murdered by immigrants so it will help him in the polls” — between 2008 and 2011, in a series of tweets that are now deleted, Gunn was fascinated with child rape and pedophilia. “Expendables is so manly I fucked the shit out of the pussy boy next to me,” the Disney director writes in one tweet, according to The Wrap.

“The best thing about being raped is when you’re done being raped and it’s like ‘whew this feels great, not being raped!’” James Gunn said in 2009, the same year he wrote this: “I like it when little boys touch me in my silly place.”

“I’m doing a big Hollywood film adaptation of The Giving Tree with a happy ending — the tree grows back and gives the kid a blowjob,” Gunn said in 2011.

“I’m doing a big Hollywood film adaptation of The Giving Tree with a happy ending — the tree grows back and gives the kid a blowjob,” he said in 2011.

“‘Eagle Snatches Kid’ is what I call it when I get lucky,” reads a tweet Gunn posted in 2012.

“The offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James’ Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with our studio’s values, and we have severed our business relationship with him,” Horn said in a statement.

In the midst of the revelation of his tweets, and the subsequent firestorm, James Gunn deactivated his personal website — but not before it had been archived online. On his website, Gunn admitted to receiving a video titled “100 pubescent girls touch themselves” from a convicted pedophile named Huston Huddleston.